What We Owe the New Critics

By MARK BAUERLEIN

When Garrick Davis told me he had assembled an anthology of New
Criticism, I reached across the table and shook his hand. Davis is
the founder of the Contemporary Poetry Review
(http://www.cprw.com), an online magazine that covers the poetry
scene inside academe and out, and he had wanted to compile a
selection of essays by that loose cohort of academics from the
1930s, 40s, and 50s who had advanced a formalist study of literary
language and tried to erect a discipline upon it. Davis came to